Cher's Long Goodbye

April 08, 2003|By ROGER CATLIN; Courant TV Critic

It's a tour billed as Cher's last. It sure has lasted.

``The Farewell Tour'' began last June and was supposed to run only until last September.

Then it stretched into the new year. Her big network concert special ``Cher: The Farewell Tour'' is broadcast in two hours of prime time tonight. Then the tour continues to run at least into late June.

Like Kiss, whose Gene Simmons is one of her many famous former paramours, Cher may be stretching her goodbye into a whole new career phase.

``I said it was a farewell tour, but I didn't say when it would end,'' she told reporters in a conference call last week from Miami, where her show from the American Airlines Arena was taped five months ago.

It's not as if the continual extension is under her control -- sold-out crowds continue to demand it. ``I swear I've played the Chicago area three times,'' she says.

She also will have played the Connecticut market three times. After last year's big show at the Mohegan Sun, she returns there May 25 and stops at the Arena at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport April 29.

Cher, who turns 57 next month, says she's calling it her last tour in part because she doesn't think she'll ever be able to top its massive spectacle.

``This is the best show I've ever done,'' she says. ``I don't want to do something less than this.''

Too many performers tour past their prime. ``I don't want to do less than the best show I've ever done,'' she says. ``There comes a time when you should stop doing certain things.''

Besides all that, she says, ``I don't like being on the road.''

She continued, going to great lengths to explain a life at odds with the glamour she shows on stage.

``On the road, you feel like you're in jail. You get into a place at three in the morning. You're not sure where you are,'' she says. ``Sometimes you don't know how you get from place to place each night.''

``You want to get out so you don't feel like a prisoner,'' she says. But her celebrity often prevents that.

``I miss freedom -- being in my house walking downstairs to my kitchen. I don't cook, but I could if I wanted to. Or walking or getting in my car. The most basic things.''

``You have no idea how hard the road is,'' she says at last. ``It's a killer. You begin to understand why people do drugs on the road.''

So with a tour that's so spectacular, involving a crew of more than 100, why doesn't she stay put and let the fans come to her, as Celine Dion is doing?

``It never even occurred to me,'' Cher says. ``I think this thing Celine is doing nobody has ever done before.

``It's not a bad idea. But I couldn't do it too long. Celine has been doing it for three years. I could never do that.''

If she did, a good location would be Miami, where she was house hunting while there to shoot a new Farrelly Brothers movie -- ``Stuck on You'' with Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear and Meryl Streep.

Her role: playing herself, or at least an extremely narcissistic version of herself. ``It's difficult to play yourself,'' says the winner of the 1987 best actress Oscar for ``Moonstruck.'' ``It's especially difficult to play yourself in a way you don't see yourself.''

"I like the sun and the water,'' she says of Miami. And the crowd there, seen in the special, certainly seems to love her.

Cher's career has been hot since ``Believe'' became her biggest worldwide recording in 1999, giving her the longest span between No. 1 singles (until a remix of an Elvis Presley song last summer).

Burbling with a bright new electronic sound, the Grammy-winning song for best dance recording had actually been an international hit before it was released in the United States.

Her recordings were released late in the United States not because America is slow to respond to techno-style music -- though that's true too, she says. ``The music always comes from Europe over here -- that kind of electronic music.''

In her case, the music was slow to come to the states because she was signed to a European division of her record company and her m

``Believe'' is a high point of her current concert tour, which begins with her elaborate version of U2's ``I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'' and pauses to recognize her early career as part of Sonny and Cher by singing their first hit, a version of Bob Dylan's ``All I Really Want To Do.''

``Believe'' is also the only song that involves some electronic noodling and enhanced tapes, she says.

``The pitch machine,'' she says of the device that alters her voice electronically in the song's bridge. ``It runs through a little thing on the [sound] board.

``I don't know what it is but it's some little thing that the vocal goes through. Plus because there's more than one voice on that part. I can only do one voice, so we add a track. That's the only part of the show that I do it. But in the part with the vocoder or pitch machine we use, there's two vocals, one actually on the track already and one that's live.''

It's the only thing that puts her in league with the female pop singers of a new generation. But her show, overall, is more demanding, she says.